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SERP Spam Definition: Spamdexing

SERP Spam Definition: Spamdexing

There have been many definitions of Search Engine Spam, with the most historical one being attributed to Doorway Pages:

Doorways are a technology often used in spamdexing. A doorway basically is a site page optimized for one or several keyphrases aimed to get ranked high in the SERPs. An automatically generated doorway contains random text which includes necessary keyphrases. Thus, a doorway is useless to a surfer. A manually made doorway may contain narrow-niche information valuable for internet users.

I keep an eye on the Bing Webmaster Community as well and a really good definition from Rick DeJarnette identifies Web Spam as:

Web spam is unwanted web content that uses overtly manipulative techniques in an effort to fraudulently attain undeservingly high ranking in search engines.

Having run various searches of Google Forums, I found various references to WebSpam, one of which which is part of the Adsense Quality guidelines:

Make sure your site adds value. Publishers are not allowed to create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Publishers must provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit their site first.

Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Why have I pulled out the above? Because they give an inkling into Google’s partial view of webspam. However note that penalties for Spamdexing aren’t restricted to Adsense, if your site is found selling products to spam search engines, your adwords account may also be shut down. Specifically they prohibit the promotion of anything that promote:

techniques to artificially inflate the ranking of websites by spamming search engines:

cloaking

keyword stuffing

doorway pages

However, Google does not limit its definition of Web Spam to the above, it also identifies it as:

If you’ve ever clicked a search result and been taken to a junk page—a page that’s blank, completely unrelated to your search, or full of gibberish —then you’re familiar with spam. The term “spam” or “web spam” refers to the kind of content created by webmasters who attempt to manipulate search results with deceptive methods.

For the purpose of this site, as you can see, we would like to use the Definition of Web Spam as:

The practice of getting pages into the search engine results without caring what the Fuck the search engines think about it